I have the opportunity to pick up a fully loaded Blade Center for a good price. My question is though,is it worth it, and what would I do with it? I've never dealt with Blades before,but deep down I KNOW I won't one, but why?

Below are the specs of a similar system I've found on e-bay as a comparison. Is it worth it, and what would you do with the beast.

I would have to say that they generate a lot of heat, and suck a ton of power. In this day and age I would seriously look at running VMware (or equivalent) on a single (or a couple of servers with VMotion) server rather than running a blade setup. If this would be for purely personal use I might even hesitate to get it just due to those two factors alone (heat & power use). If this will be for work and you need all that computational power in a single chassis I say go for it. As a former Big Blue employee we used lots of these for many clients and they work well. The interface and power setups are nice and we never really had any problems with them.

I would have to say that they generate a lot of heat, and suck a ton of power. In this day and age I would seriously look at running VMware (or equivalent) on a single (or a couple of servers with VMotion) server rather than running a blade setup. If this would be for purely personal use I might even hesitate to get it just due to those two factors alone (heat & power use). If this will be for work and you need all that computational power in a single chassis I say go for it. As a former Big Blue employee we used lots of these for many clients and they work well. The interface and power setups are nice and we never really had any problems with them.

Holy crap, that is a lot of servers. Here is the thing... Xeon 3.2GHz is a Pentium IV based processor. So you are talking about pretty old servers (old enough that I've been throwing them out at that age) and a LOT of them and from the highly inefficient era. So running that blade chassis is going to cost an arm and a leg. I'm getting upwards of a grand a month - idle. Having a bunch of blades like that is cool and no one has one of those at home, but there is a reason for that.

And the noise... holy cow will that be aproblem.

I'm hoping you have a garage to put this in and a dedicated AC system to cool it?

I would have to say that they generate a lot of heat, and suck a ton of power. In this day and age I would seriously look at running VMware (or equivalent) on a single (or a couple of servers with VMotion) server rather than running a blade setup. If this would be for purely personal use I might even hesitate to get it just due to those two factors alone (heat & power use). If this will be for work and you need all that computational power in a single chassis I say go for it. As a former Big Blue employee we used lots of these for many clients and they work well. The interface and power setups are nice and we never really had any problems with them.

Agreed (hey, I'm former Big Blue too!), if this is for business, buy something new. If this is for home, pass on it. It isn't a good fit for either scenario, typically.

Well, thanks guys. Question answered. This was purely a personal thing for me to learn more about Blades. Scott, yes they would have gone into our shed where most of the other hardware is located, so noise wouldn't be an issue, well, for us anyway, but the neighbours may get a little pissed.

Since power and cooling are the biggest issues, I will decline the offer. Thank you to all of you for your input though..

Well, thanks guys. Question answered. This was purely a personal thing for me to learn more about Blades. Scott, yes they would have gone into our shed where most of the other hardware is located, so noise wouldn't be an issue, well, for us anyway, but the neighbours may get a little pissed.

Since power and cooling are the biggest issues, I will decline the offer. Thank you to all of you for your input though..

Jas

I have an 11 rack (not 11 rack unit, 11 full racks) AS/400 that I've never fired up for the same reason. We estimated closer to $5K per month!!

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